Dang, it’s August already. There’s a lot of moving going on (or about to be). Unless delayed again, it’s looking like to move to Mueller at the end of September and Olivia and Garrick are going to San Francisco. I don’t mind another reason to go back to visit that city. =) We checked out the new Mueller HEB’s cafe their opening weekend and it was decent enough. I could see myself talking a walk there with Mozilla frequently, especially once the weather isn’t so scorching. Viraj and I have some tentative plans to get wasted there cause it’d be hilarious.

Ryan’s decided to take a gig at Mozilla, which is pretty sweet for him, but it’s unfortunate that my time working with him again will only be 1.5 months. =p Right before I started at MR, I took a trip to San Francisco to do some hanging out with recent ex-coworkers and just chill. In a rare occurrence, I decided not to take my DSLR and man did it make a difference walking around. I felt so much lighter! I don’t think this means I won’t bring it with me on future trips, but I’ve pics of SF enough and plan on coming back many times in the future, so I figured I’d be lazy. Here are some randoms from my iPhone though:

Coffee time:

My parents used to own an ice cream shop around this area and I have multiple baby pics here. Always fun to return, and this time there was actually water running:

More childhood nostalgia:

Love this stuff:

Oriana recently got the dogs some cow hoof to chew on at Andrew’s suggestion and this resulted in the first time I’ve had to break up a Mozilla and Badger fight. I’m pretty sure Badger started it, but maybe I’m biased. =) They’re normally pretty good though:

This past Friday I went to Town Lake (yes, I’ll still call it that) with the MR crew for their “fantastic friday” and took Mozilla along with me. He spent a decent amount of time looking at some large turtles:

Alright, for better or worse, here’s my opinion on all the crazy. I may be wildly inaccurate on information that leads me to these opinions, so if you have points you think I should be aware of, don’t hesitate to enlighten me. =)

HB2 - it seems to me that if this bill went through and led to no clinic closures, no one would have an issue. Is that correct? On paper, the bill is focused on improving the quality of care and making it safer for women, or that’s the claim as I understand it. The issue is that this is seen as an underhanded way of closing down a majority of clinics because most of them will be unable to meet the bar set forth in the bill, right? I suppose my thoughts then are:

• How accurate is it that a majority of clinics will close down?




• For example, how influenced by profit are these clinics? Are they incentivized to claim they’ll be forced to close?


• Even if the ones do close down, is it unlikely that new ones open that do sufficiently meet the bill’s requirements?


• The math must be doable… has someone calculated the financial feasibility of running a clinic while abiding by the bill’s requirements?




• Which specific aspects of the bill are unreasonable? IMO, it seems that at least some of them are fine.

This bill’s gotten a lot of media/social attention by pulling in “women’s rights” into it and if it’s in fact true that the bar set in this bill leaves it financially impossible to offer appropriate services to women in need, then I don’t doubt that it ends up achieving something counter to what it’s supposed to on paper, and that would be bad. I’m not entirely sure if I’m convinced this bill is ALL bad though, but I can definitely see how it could be if it does in fact lead to an increase in illegal abortions from potentially dangerous sources. I feel like a lot of people jumped on the “protecting women’s rights” bandwagon (which is not a bad thing), but I’m curious… is there a version of this bill that would be deemed “good?” Certainly there’s a set of abortion sources that are currently illegal and dangerous and should remain that way. Or are there people out there who feel like even those should be legal in the name of “rights” and “choice?”

Zimmerman/Martin - Zimmerman’s verifiable actions (those backed up by his call to the police and eye witness accounts), though potentially deemed unwise, are reasonable for someone to take, especially given the history of crime in the area and that he was head of the neighborhood watch. Neither Zimmerman nor Martin did anything legally wrong until someone made the first move to assault the other. The evidence seems to shift against Martin at this point, but it doesn’t seem like anyone knows who “threw the first punch” conclusively. At the very least, there is not sufficient evidence to counter Zimmerman’s claims and his account of what happens seems at the very least plausible. It very well could be that he got away with cold-blooded murder, but “innocent until proven guilty” is what we generally run with over here. I don’t think anyone can reasonably say he was proven guilty with the evidence on the table. I also think this case is more racially charged than it needs to be and the media has made Zimmerman out to be more “racist” than the facts seem to indicate.

Snowden - Doesn’t seem so bad.

I’ve got two weeks off until I start at Mass Relevance, and it just so happened that Andrew is in Austin for the first of those weeks, so it seemed like a good time to have Meatcation III! Here are some highlights with the rest being here. Meatcation.com will get you to past Meatcations. =)

On Sunday, we had sliders:

…and bone marrow from Salt & Time:

On Monday, we made some crazy cryoseared duck:

On Tuesday, we made (way too much) pot au feu with veal shank, beef shank, garlic sausage, beef bone marrows, and an assortment of spices, veggies, and potatoes. This is a picture of one pot. We amateurily bought enough to fill three (a pot next to this one as well as a large crock pot, elsewhere). I’ve been having this for lunch the past few days…

Wednesday was quail enchiladas:

Then on Thursday, we went to the opening of Qui and were the first ones in the door!

Tomorrow’s Friday! Gotta get down on Friday.

Pics after it happens. =)

I’m moving to Mueller! I’m getting something that looks like this, but not as crazy (it’s the model home, so it’s got a bunch of the extra craziness in it). I’ll be pretty close to the new Mueller HEB and will have no more yard to maintain (yay!).

I’m a little worried I’ll regret not having a yard for the dogs to run around, but it will force me to walk them, which is probably a good thing. I’ll have to make some visits to the dog parks so Mozilla can get his sprinting on. Deciding whether I want to sell or rent my current home (leaning towards selling). Home switching is such a hassle! I’m pretty excited about my new location though.

In other news, I’m also psyched about this new Superman movie. It better not be a let down like the last one.

Dang, blog. Sorry it’s been so long. =)

I was holding off on mentioning this because there was so much I wanted to talk about, but I’ll just go ahead and throw it out there and if there’s anything else for me to say, I’ll do it another time. =p After about 6.5 years at Bazaarvoice, I’m off to Mass Relevance starting July 1. BV’s been such a great experience filled with lots of opportunity for me that it’s bittersweet to say goodbye. The team I’ve been on for the past year-ish has been awesome and I’d be lucky to experience that type of passion, camaraderie, and teamwork in the future. I’ll miss you guys!

That said, it’s time I start a new adventure, so I’m headed to MR where I’ll have the benefit of working with a lot of ex-BVers who I think highly of. If they switch to first.last email addresses before I get there I’ll be very sad! ;)

I added more to my nerd XP by going to a Magic draft with Jonney on Wednesday. Despite drafting what I thought was the worst deck I’ve ever drafted, I got second place with it, so that’s good I guess. I’ve always thought that Magic was a game I could be really competitively good at if I wanted to invest the time into it and “go pro” despite how silly that sounds (hey, some of the prizes are no joke though). =) That said, I don’t know if I can handle playing it for days straight.

I saw the new GI JOE with Mark and Greg. It was fairly bad, but I guess enjoyable enough. My expectations were for an enjoyable bad movie and it probably met those expectations, but did not exceed. Maybe next time it can apply for a raise.

In a week, a few of us make a quick hop to Phoenix to stuff our faces with some more grub! About a month after that, I will be taking a vacation with the family to San Diego. It’s been forever ago since we’ve taken a family trip, so this is almost like a first time, especially since we’re all older now. I’m looking forward to it, but I think my eardrums are bracing themselves. :p

The site I was helping the Greater Good Labs guys with launched a little while ago, SnapKind.com. Check it, but be gentle… it’s a baby and needs some growing up still. ;)

My sisters love it when I expose them to terrible entertainment.

When I made Oriana watch High School Musical with me:

Then, she was super happy when we moved on to Taylor Swift: Journey to Fearless:

The above shenanigans have humorously led to the following:

And… here’s some random photo dumping…

On Valentine’s, Oriana and I went to Amy’s with the pups:

Mozilla’s support was not enough for the 49ers to win:

Viraj has a bit of a germaphobe problem. One time a while back, he was charging his phone, but was scared of the germs on the ground, so he wasted a perfectly good tissue to guard his phone from the evils of the floor:

To teach him a lesson, I replaced it with a fruit roll-up wrapper:

Back in my early days of college, my friends and I had an unsuccessful web comic using a recycled domain of mine, MrTechHappy. It was primarily filled with inside jokes, and yes, used Flash because that’s what you did back in 2001.

Well, eleven years ago from yesterday (the 21st), I created Dress Up Viraj Day:

I’ve been waiting to celebrate it annually for many years now but I’ve always forgotten and missed it by a few days.

Not this year!

In memory of our beloved Teetar Baghat, I asked people to submit a photo of their phones with a picture of Viraj. We also made sure to guard our phones from the floor. You never know what might infect it. I hope for this tradition to grow and get ever more so obnoxious in the years to come.

Ladies and gentlemen, on this 11th annual Dress Up Viraj Day, I present to you the inaugural Dress Up Viraj Day tradition of our phones on the floor graced with the image of Viraj:

From Ochs:

Mine:

From Oriana:

From Aaron, all the way from down under in Australia:

From Greg:

From Sam:

From Andrew, in Dallas:

If you’d like to send in late submissions, I’ll let it slide this year and append this post to include them. For your convenience, here is a collection of Viraj photos to choose from.

As Viraj would say it, “squirt yeah!”

Happy post-Valentine’s Day, yos! All you single people complaining, just shut your yappers and do something productive. ;)

Hopefully this isn’t the only post I end up making this month, but I’m finding it hard to come up with topics I can talk about here.

I ended up buying some MJNA stock a little while back and it’s been doing well. I didn’t really buy enough to make any significant dent one way or the other, but it’s fun to say I’ve made money buying/sell marijuana. =p

Beautiful Creatures came out recently and Oriana has been driving me crazy just begging me to take her. Something about a yearning in her loins or something. So weird. Yesterday, I caught her combing her hair looking at yourself in the mirror whispering “you’re a beautiful creature.” I may have to give in and take her or I may find myself asleep forever.*

My Volt has been pretty satisfactory so far. The air dam at the front of the car is super low to the ground and it scrapes every so often whenever I go through various inclines. Supposedly it’s built to withstand that type of thing and it’s expected, but it’s mildy annoying. The central panel controls are also annoying, most of them not being actual buttons. That said, I have yet to visit a gas station after going over 1200 miles (I still have about half a tank left). It’s not really fair, but looking at gas alone, I’ve probably done something like 280MPG. ;) I did end up doing the calculation for how much fully charging the car costs, and during this time of the year it’s about $0.65, which gets me about 37 miles. So if I do the miles per dollar calculation, it’s probably something in the ballpark of 36 miles per $1. FYI, during the summer, I expect a full charge to be about $1. Honestly, I’m not sure if it makes sense to buy the Volt purely based on the travel cost savings, but it’s a fun metric to look at.

It was brought to my attention today that there are only five people at BV who have been there longer than me. Crazy!

— Oliver Wong (@owiber) February 1, 2013

*-This is basically all a lie.

I guess I should post something before January is gone!

First, I got Oriana a puppy. He had a cool name at the humane society, Thor, but she changed it to Badger.

This guy also got Mozilla sick, but he’s getting over it now. He’s also very fat, and looks like he’s always sad. He seems like a pretty fun puppy though. Here are a few more photos of the little punk:

Mozillabomb:

In other news, I am taking a six week sabbatical from Bazaarvoice and helping out the crew at Greater Good Labs. It’s bittersweet as the team I’m leaving is super great, but I’m looking forward to helping start something new. Super kudos to BV for giving me the opportunity to take some time away.

It’s been about a month and a week and I’m still sitting at about half a tank of gas. Given this, I think even when I do need to fill up, I’m not going to fill up all the way. Pretty pleased with the Volt so far. I did the calculation and during the winter, it’s probably around 65 cents to charge up all the way. In the summer, it’ll probably be around $1.

With that, I will leave you with this:

“My gosh! Just kill myself listening to you.” - sister @livizilla to me

— Oliver Wong (@owiber) December 23, 2012